


On Tuesdays life is wonderful

by summerwishes



Category: Johnny's Jr., Johnny's WEST, Kis-My-Ft2 (Band), Sexy Zone
Genre: AU, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mutants, Angst, M/M, Multi, Multiple Pairings, Parties, humans with animal body parts due to science, mentions of a kind-of eating disorder, mentions of shitty parents, none of them too important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 03:53:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4332864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerwishes/pseuds/summerwishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They'll get drunk again and feel a little love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Tuesdays life is wonderful

**Author's Note:**

> first time posting to ao3 hello! this is my fic to otherworlds exchange from last year that never happened. summary is from ed sheeran's drunk.

Taiga stood in the middle of the room, his tail resting against his leg, dark fur shining under the lights. He wasn’t sure where he had been a moment ago or where he had been heading to but he felt content with things being as they were. He stood alone among the dancing strangers, in the middle of conversations that were held around him, without knowing anything more than that he had never felt better.

It was a perfect Tuesday.

 

*****

 

For once Kotaki wasn’t towering over everybody. He was spread out on one of the couches, legs disappearing under a couple of girls perched on top of him, chatting away in familiar sounding Kansai-ben. Kotaki himself was listening to a conversation between Hokuto and Yasui, but he was mostly not paying attention – knowing the two it was more foreplay than a real conversation anyway.

The room around him was filled with music, soft lights and long shadows. He knew Akito was somewhere near, and that he didn’t have to worry even though he hadn’t seen the shorter Osakan for a couple of hours. If a place where even Akito wouldn’t be able to find trouble existed, it was right there in front of him.

Kotaki gave a lazy wave to Shori who was moving towards the sofa, and turned then to look at Hokuto and Yasui just to notice that they were already kissing, Hokuto’s hands in Yasui’s back pockets. Kotaki’s ears twitched with interest, and he wondered briefly if Shori would be up for that tonight.

 

*****

 

They gathered together on Tuesdays because nobody else did. They had the only party in the city on Tuesdays, and it was always the best party of the week. They had three floors all for themselves, without any interfering by the outside world. The world had tried, years ago when they first started, but after realizing that nothing could be done they had silently disappeared.

All the buildings within a five hundred meter radius had been abandoned. Now they were the only ones left, lighting the neighborhood up every Tuesday and then disappearing for another week. The house they used had had all its windows closed with planks and nails, and it had lost most of the original paint work but they didn’t care. It was clean inside, they had a lot of space, and they had it all for themselves.

 

*****

 

Shoki downed his glass, throwing his head back, and shouted:

“This is the be~st!”

Taiga snorted from the armchair where he was sitting, limbs tangled with Myuto’s, his tail tapping against Myuto’s thigh. Myuto wasn’t showing anything on his face, but his gills were trembling slightly, which meant that he was in the verge of laughing.

Teranishi answered Shoki’s scream by puffing up the few green and red feathers growing around his ears and flashing a grin, stretching his arm out to grab Shoki’s wrist.

“You say that every week,” he noted, drawing Shoki closer, until their foreheads were touching and he could smell strawberry, alcohol and cinnamon ( _“where did that come from,”_ he wondered) in Shoki’s breath.

“Yeah I do, because it’s true,” Shoki said. He was still smiling, his eyes half shut and his tail on a happy twirl. Their lips were only millimeters away from touching, the moment before kiss feeling so important that Teranishi held his breath, wanting to savour it a little while longer. They stood like that, faces already touching each other but still not quite kissing, hand in hand, music thumping around them.

 

*****

 

They all knew Shoki had it hard. He had his long, silky lemur tail that made him untouchable. There was no-one who would’ve dared to comment on his outer appearance. In fact there was no-one who would’ve even thought about it. That didn’t make his life any easier, though.

The thing was that they were automatically beautiful. Face, body type, hair, the length of legs… None of those things mattered as long as there was something. As long as there were pointy ears or a swaying tail there was no debate about whether the person was beautiful or not.

That’s why they didn’t have to care about the norms and the way beauty was defined. They had the right to be outside of the norms. When normal people got told to cut their hair, lose weight, or get a nose job, it was _their_ hairstyles and noses that normal people wanted to have. They knew about the pressures on normal people but they could’ve just ignored them. Being made constantly aware of the pressures being placed on normal people like this, ignoring their problems was easier said than done.

That meant Shoki spent episode after episode of his variety show with celebrities who were all several sizes smaller than him, but who constantly got told to lose weight or risk not being able to find work anymore. Their own disparaging comments about their weight didn’t help, either. Nobody ever said anything to him; nobody ever asked him if he’d considered dieting or working out a bit more, but that didn’t stop him thinking about those things.

His smile was bright throughout the episodes, his jokes keeping the atmosphere light, but the ones who were closest to him knew. They knew how Shoki sometimes stared at his reflection in the bathroom, mouth pressed into a thin line and an angry look in his eyes. They recognized the stiffness in his shoulders when he had to eat around people.

Now Shoki was sitting on one of the sofas, laughing at something with a drink in hand, his other hand resting on Shintaro’s knee. He had thrown his legs over Shintaro’s, and Shintaro had his knee in a firm grip. The group of people around him surrounded him almost completely, forming a shelter between him and the outer world. They were drawn in by his smile and he was basking in the attention, in the innocent affection he was getting from all these people who also had it hard in the real world.

 

*****

 

There seemed to be more people coming every Tuesday. There were also people missing; those that had work far away, those that were sick, or those who already had a hangover. Nobody skipped Tuesdays for dates or family, as to them, Tuesdays were a time for both.

Nobody understood as well as the others, not even their families. A couple of years ago parents didn’t have all the info they had today. They hadn’t really thought it through when they’d seen the commercials on television. It had been convincing enough – no risks, a secured future for the child, attention and fame. And of course the novelty of it all, how easy it was to become special.

That had resulted in parents who didn’t understand what it was like to be constantly loved by the world. There were legions of parents who were jealous of their beautiful, extraordinary children who never had to worry about a thing. As a result, when their children needed them the most, their parents weren’t able to do anything to help.

That’s what they all came for on Tuesday. For understanding, for support and love. To be reminded that they weren’t alone after all.

 

*****

 

“Let’s dance!”

Kotaki turned around to see Shintaro standing in front of him, hands crossed against his chest and a determined look on his face.

“I didn’t think you danced,” Kotaki answered, taking a step away from the drink table, closer to Shintaro.

He had cut his hair, Kotaki noticed, the shortness of it making him look even older than before. He was wearing a light gray t-shirt and black jeans, going with his usual, simple style. All the times Kotaki had seen Shintaro on TV he had been wearing an almost identical outfit. Then again, with a face like Shintaro’s he wouldn’t have had to worry about such mundane things as clothes even if he had been one of the normal ones.

“Well I do today.” He was pouting now, the childish expression in contrast with his outer appearance.

“That’s funny, I felt like dancing today, too. Would you like a drink before we go?” Kotaki drew a glass with a pink drink inside of it from behind his back and offered it to Shintaro with raised eyebrows.

“Sure.” Shintaro nodded, accepting the drink. He grabbed it and was done before Kotaki had swallowed even his first mouthful.

“And now you better dance with me for the whole night and not disappear for a shag in the toilets like all those other assholes.”

 

*****

 

It had been one of the few mistakes. There were no risks, that’s what they said to the parents. Nothing bad ever happened to the children.

The Kiriyama family hadn’t been that lucky.

It seemed to be going fine – there were no abnormalities in the tests, nothing weird in the ultrasound images. The labor went well, too.

The first one to notice anything out of the ordinary was the doctor in charge. She had been through these kind of special labors dozens of times, but when she first took a look at the tiny newborn in her arms she knew right away that it had finally happened. She had delivered her first flawed one.

She felt her heart stopping, brain going into panic. How could she tell the family what had happened? What were the right words?

They took it surprisingly well. She could see tears in the father’s eyes and the mother looked angry, almost scarily so, but it could have been a lot worse. She had heard stories of fights, suicides, attempts to harm the baby… But nothing like that happened. They left the hospital a couple of days later and she didn’t hear of them again until she turned on the TV years later and saw a cheerful teenager announcing his name was Kiriyama Akito and getting tsukkomi’ed right after for some idiotic joke nobody understood.

Statistically Kiriyama Akito shouldn’t have had any chance to succeed. The rare ones like him usually ended up in back alleys or national laboratories because they simply looked too weird to be considered beautiful. One of the flawed ones.

The wanted result was nine parts human, one part animal. Nobody wanted their child to have a horse’s face or giraffe’s legs. They wanted fluffy ears, elegant tails, extraordinary skin anomalies. And that’s what they got, because that resulted in the thing that the first tests had been looking for: beauty.

But every once in a while something went wrong, as if genetics had wanted to show what they were capable of, that humankind hadn’t completely tamed them, and the result was different. One and a half parts animal, two parts animal… once even half an animal, but that hadn’t lasted long. The body was still used in new investigations of the “beauty mutations”, as they were called among the scientists.

Akito wasn’t exactly two parts animal, but almost. He had the spotty ears of a bird hound, but there were also patches of fur among his hair, white hairs visible among the black ones, some on the curve of his nose, too, and pad-like palms, pink and soft. Some also said that his tongue was bigger than regular human tongue, but those were never complaints.

He acted a bit like a dog, too. There was nothing similar between him and the tall and slender models who participated in hundreds of photoshoots every year, posing with whatever product they were given with their tails and ears. He was noisy and annoying, always ready to make jokes about his hairy nose or long ears. He didn’t get to appear in the same prime time shows as the others did, but he had his late night variety shows and comedy gigs and people knew him. And they liked him, and he liked them. He was the national puppy, and Akito loved it.

 

*****

 

It was warm and noisy and Taiga heard Myuto and Casey laugh at something behind his back. They were making their way through the big room on the second floor, people dancing to the electro music filling the air. The room looked more like someone’s living room than a nightclub. The windows were covered with heavy, dark red satin curtains, there were sofas and armchairs at the back of the room and the drinks were balanced on old, carved wooden tables that had lion paws at the tip of their legs (Teranishi had once said that “Even the tables are like us!” and Taiga remembered it every once in a while and smiled at the memory).

When they had almost made it to the stairs starting at the other end of the dance floor Taiga heard a familiar voice calling him. When he turned to look in the direction from which the voice had come, a figure drew away from the happily chatting pile of people occupying one of the dark purple sofas, and said,

“It really is you!”

He was just close enough for Taiga to hear him even through the chatter and the music, and Taiga knew right away who it was.

“Fujigaya-senpai!”

The man waved to him as a response and carefully shoved a kissing couple out of the way before standing up and walking to Taiga.

Taiga hadn’t seen Fujigaya for weeks, he had been busy, doing some modeling or a TV drama or something, Taiga couldn’t remember properly. Fujigaya was always busy; it was impossible to keep up with his schedule.

He stood out even when there were no normal people around. He was beautiful, but so was everybody else. It was more about the way he carried his oddity – he was never trying to hide it, never apologized for it.

It was usual for new people to first think he had nothing. They were all used to looking for the obvious ones, ears and tails, and Fujigaya had neither. But when they looked closer they noticed the lighter spots on his cheeks and his arms, and after that it never took long to notice the spots were actually fur, leopard fur, small patches on his cheeks and bigger ones on his arms and thighs.

When they finally figured it all out they always asked if they could touch it. Taiga could swear Fujigaya loved those moments of strangers touching him more than anything.

“I’ve seen you in that morning drama, good job cat samurai!”

“I’m not actually a samurai, just a farmer’s son,” Taiga pointed out, unable to keep the self-satisfaction out of his voice. Fujigaya had such a busy schedule yet he had known about the drama he was appearing in.

“Hey, let’s go eat again sometime, okay,” Fujigaya smiled at him and Taiga couldn’t help but smile back, his tail making embarrassingly happy spirals in the air.

 

*****

 

Akito stumbled upon Kotaki when Kotaki was just starting his career at the age of fourteen. He was already taller than most kids his age, already unable to go to any normal school because of his fluffy ears of a black panther.

Despite looking almost like an adult he was nervous, sitting alone in the guest dressing room of a food-themed variety show that often had new talents making their first TV appearances in it. Akito wasn’t in the same show, but one of his shows was filming at the same time and he happened to see Kotaki when he was looking for a coffee machine.

“Hello,” Akito said, but he wasn’t really sure why. “Why’re you here all alone?”

Kotaki turned to look at him, eyes big and wide and full of fear, and Akito knew he couldn’t leave him there, wallowing in his nervousness without anybody to guide him through it.

“Hey kiddo, let’s go get something to drink. I’ll teach you some jokes and you’ll promote my show, alright?”

In the end Kotaki did really use Akito’s jokes, and he did really promote his show. After that they appeared together more often than not, the whole of Japan following the progress of the friendship between the nation’s most loved flawed one and one of the most popular newcomers.

 

*****

 

They all became famous. There were no office workers with cat ears, no taxi drivers with a lion tail. They were models and actors, comedians and musicians. They all had an agency, and the agencies fought over commercial deals and contracts with all their power.

Usually they started working around the time they turned fifteen. There were some child stars, but mostly the agencies started pushing them when they already looked like adults. There was an unspoken rule about keeping their childhoods in secret.

Every once in a while there were parents for whom it wasn’t enough that their kid was known all over Japan and who wanted to get their fair share of fame too, but the public never really liked them. They might read their interviews, talk about their revelations in hushed tones, but if somebody asked they never had anything good to say about them. People didn’t want to know about the people behind the decisions, they just wanted to see the beauty that resulted in them.

The new ones appeared together often, marketing washing powder in matching white sweaters or recording a theme song for a drama series in a group of six. Their agencies made inquiries and googled their names and sometimes even sent people to listen to conversations on the streets to find out who was popular among which target group. It was never a question of who was popular, they all were. They just needed to find their own fields.

After a couple of years of appearances in whatever spots they got via their agencies, the new ones stopped being new and started concentrating on a couple of things. They were all wanted for modeling and commercials, but not everybody could carry a tune or tell jokes that were actually funny. If there was nothing else, they could all get enough commercial deals and variety show appearances to keep themselves busy until they retired.

Their parents were mostly happy for the success, never quite able to understand their extraordinary children. They were usually only children, so there was no sibling rivalry. Some families were allowed to produce two children, but only on the rarest of occassions. The Fujii family was one of a kind, with two daughters who carried their tiger claws with pride, and one bunny-eared son.

The special ones themselves were never heard complaining. Of course they could talk about their busy schedules, especially when they were younger and less experienced with the show business, but that wasn’t real complaining. It wasn’t about who they were and who they were made to be – it was just small talk with the program’s hosts.

The real complaining happened in private estates, only among themselves, usually at the end of the night, and they were never talked about again. They understood each other, and even though nothing could ever be done about it, it felt good to be able to complain like a normal person for once.

 

*****

 

They had taken him in right away. He had been young and lost, like they all had been just a couple of years, maybe even a few months, ago, so they’d gathered around him and made him part of them.

It wasn’t clear who ‘they’ actually were, but in general it meant four, five young guys from the same agency. They were all around the same age, all doing the same kind of beginners’ jobs. Shoki had started three years earlier, Hokuto two and Kotaki a year and a half before him. There were some others who started keeping an eye on him, invited him to places and chatted with him during the lunch hours, but those three were the ones Morimoto Shintaro felt most comfortable with.

They didn’t have to babysit him for long. He soon became the face of Japan’s national tourism campaign posters, appearing on thousands of pictures, posing with his curled akita tail and the slogan “The Real Japanese”. He had no idea what the sentence meant, but neither did anybody else, so he concentrated on not blushing every time he saw his face, ten times bigger, on the wall of a train station or a bus.

He got new projects right away, appearing both with and without his new guardians. He got modeling jobs, which he didn’t like that much because it was awkward to pose for the cameras all alone, and acting jobs, which were fun but a lot of work. He liked it the most, however, when he didn’t have to be alone in front of the audience. Everything was easier when Hokuto and his dark brown bear ears were there to take some of the attention away from him, or when Kotaki was there to tell dumb jokes and show off his gorgeous black panther ears.

With time he got more used to working alone, but he still requested the company to give him variety show appearances and photoshoots with other people whenever he could. And on Tuesdays he was never alone, making sure that he was always surrounded by friends.

Except for now, when Hokuto and Yasui had already disappeared hours ago and Shoki had gone to get a drink and had never returned. Shintaro slumped on his chair, grumpily listening to the conversation around him.

There were some people from his agency and some he had worked with, but he didn’t really want to spend the whole night with them, not when he knew Kotaki had to be somewhere close by. He hadn’t seen him yet, but he was sure he wouldn’t leave him alone. Kotaki was tall and reassuringly simple and Shintaro found himself hoping he could work more in the Kansai region, just to get to see him more.

Suddenly he saw a hint of black ears above everyone else and jumped up of his chair. He made his way through the mingling people, mumbling apologies while trying to get a glimpse of the boy he had seen earlier. Luckily Kotaki was easy to find, and Shintaro was determined to get him to hang out with him for the rest of the night, even if it meant he’d have to get rid of thousands of the suitors always surrounding Kotaki.

 

*****

 

The music was loud and the dance floor was always full. There were bottles and cups and punch bowls on all surfaces. Tables and huge arm chairs formed small islands of fake privacy, and so did the sofas placed on alcoves at the ends of the big rooms in all three floors. Almost nobody felt the need for privacy, though; it was just their people, and they all knew what Tuesdays were for. Partying and drinking and sometimes sex, too, sure, but what they really came for was the freedom of not having to hide anything. Not having to appear mysterious and perfect, not having to act as if they were somehow better than people with regular human ears.

They came as themselves, leaving their impossible superhuman roles behind.

All of them knew each other since there weren’t that many of them. Every year more special ones were born, but as of now, they were still able to remember at least all the faces. And the older you were the less possible it was that somebody wouldn’t know your name.

In 1985 the first flawless ones had been born, two in total. Kitayama Hiromitsu with his round ice bear ears and Ueto Aya with the tail of a lion were known and recognized everywhere they went, including their Tuesday gatherings. In 1986 there had been four special babies, and the number had gotten bigger every year after that.

Now they were all under the same rooftop, as on every Tuesday. People were sitting, dancing, forming groups and then moving into other groups to exchange greetings and gossip. New ones were introduced to their senpai’s friends, older ones eager to make everything as easy for them as possible.

On that particular Tuesday Morita Myuto and Kawashima Noeru were showing off, rather proudly, the newest addition to their agency. Kajiyama Asahi was tall and had broad shoulders, and told everyone who asked, with a shaky voice, that he was Kajiyama Asahi, 15-years old. They all were shocked by his age and all wanted to offer him a drink, anyway.

One of those who offered a drink and got a very polite, very young _no thank you_ in return was Teranishi Takuto, who, when refused, shrugged and went to tell Shoki, who had been the one to dare him to “go get the fresh blood” in the first place, that they’d have to drink alone on that night. Which didn’t exactly go as planned, either, since he ran into Hokuto on the way back and invited him and Taiga to come sit with them. Shoki had also found a bunch of girls from the same agency as him, so in the end they formed a laughing, shrieking group of approximately twelve people, and nobody in the room batted an eyelid since they were all doing the same.

 

*****

 

Like all Tuesdays, this Tuesday came to an end, too. The first batch of people left the building when the sun came up, still chatting cheerfully.

Inside the building the party was still going, maybe a little noisier than before. A lot of the people had moved to the smaller rooms or to the sofas, but there were still groups socializing on the dance floor, or eating the food someone always ordered around four o’clock. The music had toned down a bit so that people could have their end of the night conversations about life and death and the ridiculousness of everything they had to go through on daily basis.

When Taiga stumbled out of the door it was already eight AM. He stretched his arms, trying to keep the sleepiness at bay a little while longer. He knew he could call a car to pick him up but there really was no reason to. The morning was clear and the air was crispy, a hint of autumn in it already.

He had left Myuto sleeping on the bed, Shoki curled up on the arm chair next to it. They wouldn’t wake up in a long time, but Taiga didn’t mind walking home alone.

His tail swayed in the air as he moved further away from the building. He really didn’t mind getting an extra hour away from the real world, especially not when the weather was this good.

**Author's Note:**

> i thought someone might be interested, so here’s a list of all the mentioned characters with their mutations (if i’m missing someone please poke me!):
> 
> Kotaki Nozomu: Black panther’s ears  
> Kiriyama Akito: Bird hound’s ears, patches of fur among his hair & on his face, paw-like hands  
> Morohoshi Shoki: Lemur’s tail  
> Morimoto Shintaro: Akita’s tail  
> Sato Shori: Deer’s horns (still very small)  
> Yasui Kentaro: Chinchilla’s ears  
> Matsukura Hokuto: Bear’s ears (brown)  
> Casey Anderson: Buffalo’s horns  
> Teranishi Takuto: Parrot’s feather’s around his eyes  
> Kyomoto Taiga: Cat’s tail (black)  
> Morita Myuto: Shark’s teeth & gills  
> Fujigaya Taisuke: Patches of leopard’s fur on his face, hands & thighs  
> Kawashima Noeru: Swallow’s wings (not big enough to fly with but too big to fit under normal shirts)  
> Kajiyama Asahi: Tiger’s stripes on his face, arms, sides and legs  
> Fujii Ryusei: Rabbit’s ears  
> His sisters: Tiger’s claws  
> Kitayama Hiromitsu: Ice bear’s ears  
> Ueto Aya: Lion’s tail


End file.
